"LG said today it was acquiring WebOS from Hewlett-Packard, with the intention to use the operating system not for its mobile phones, but in its smart televisions. With the deal, LG obtains the source code for WebOS, related documentation, engineering talent, and related WebOS Web sites. LG also gets HP licenses for use with its WebOS products, and patents HP obtained from Palm. The financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed." Completely and utterly pointless. Smart TVs are a dead end. The TV should just remain a dumb receiver for input - whether from a computer or console via cables, or wirelessly from a smartphone or tablet. Our phones and tablets are already smart so TVs don't have to be.

I mentioned it already but I think it's such a good idea so I'll mention it again: Ideally the smart tv computer would be located in a user serviceable slot that could be upgraded independently from the rest of the TV.

So in other words, you're advocating having a box in a slot that you upgrade every few years, vs a box that you hook up to an HDMI port? I guess I'm failing to see the difference. The advantage to an external box is that you can use any one of them that you want. If you had, for example, an LG smart tv that could be upgraded via a slot in the TV, those upgrades are going to come from LG, and they're either going to charge through the nose for them, or stop providing upgrades when they think you need to buy a new TV. We see this kind of thing on Android devices all the time.

Of course, ideally, we'd have a standard that all smart TVs would use so that you can use anyone's box to put in the slot, but again, even assuming that pipe dream were to become a reality, we're right back to where we originally started from. So we might as well just use the HDMI port as we do now.

As for everything being integrated, if you get a good tv, it's likely to last for 8-10 years, and there's no way manufacturers are going to keep the updgrades coming that long. With an external box, you can simply replace it as needed every few years or so, to get access to all of the latest streaming services. If you got a TV a few years ago with Netflix and Amazon, when Hulu was barely a blip on the radar, you probably had to get an external box anyway if you wanted access to it.